


Space Drama

by UnderTheFridge



Category: Alien Series, Alien: Isolation (Video Game), Aliens (1986)
Genre: AU, Alternate Timelines, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Gen, My Daughter Is Dating A Goddamn Robot, My Mom Hates My Synthetic Boyfriend, Robot/Human Relationships, Space Jerry Springer, most of them survive, professional heartbreaker and occasional circuit breaker Christopher Samuels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:11:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4790222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderTheFridge/pseuds/UnderTheFridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here, the events of Aliens and Alien: Isolation take place nearly simultaneously: Ellen Ripley is found while Amanda is on the mission to retrieve the flight recorder, and goes with the marines never knowing that her daughter is still alive. They are reunited once they both get back - Alien 3 never takes place, Hicks and Newt survive, and Bishop once again knows the joy of having legs.</p>
<p>Also, Amanda is dating Samuels, a WeYu synthetic - and if the terrifying alien creatures, gory deaths of her colleagues, survivor's guilt and long fight to be believed for once haven't turned Ellen Ripley's hair grey yet, this might just about do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-post from tumblr; inspired by this interferonalpha.tumblr.com/post/121946735670 post and this http://milkyandroid.tumblr.com/post/102324842445 comic. The Ripley women might have different (very, very different) approaches to synthetics, but nevertheless, they're both as scary as each other when they want to be....

Amanda wasn’t normally a person to yell, but that seemed to have changed.

She did her fair share of screaming at people on Sevastopol, then at Samuels when she thought him dead, then at the Torrens, then at Samuels again when _what do you mean emergency reboot you COULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT_.

Then she took a break, in which time things settled down a little, until Weyland-Yutani came to find her again.

At which point, she found herself yelling once again, at a poor man in a suit who had probably never seen such fury in his life and was unprepared for _WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY’VE FOUND HER I went through all that to get a goddamn empty FLIGHT RECORDER and she was just hanging out at Gateway and NOW SHE’S GONE WHERE AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN TELL ME._

And then, after about a year or so and much more quietly: _all of them?_

And _what happened to his face?_

And _she’s just a child, she’s the same age as I was when…._

And …. _where’s the rest?_

 

After that, it was mostly tears and talking; very little yelling. A huge amount of relief, that she hadn’t even known she’d been lacking until now. Not closure, but _opening_ \- the rest of their lives bright and blossoming, with her new stepfather, and adoptive sister. A family made of fragments, but they weren’t shards of glass - they were tough little chunks of space debris caught in the same orbit, punching through whatever stood in their path.

“Well, I almost was a piece of debris,” Bishop says, with a twitch of a smile that she’s learned to recognise - it means he’s joking, or at least trying to figure out how the humans will receive the comment and hoping for the best. He has a completely new body, the old one judged too damaged to support the extensive repairs it would need, but bears the scar just above his collarbones like a badge of honour (the same as the medals Hicks turned down, the accolades he didn’t want because he was lucky, and you can’t reward sheer dumb luck).

In a strange intersection of fate, Newt witnessed the ‘operation’, where the synthetic’s head was removed from his half-a-body and installed on top of a new unit, clutching a doll - Casey Point Two - with both its head and body intact. She still brags about seeing it and _not even puking once_. It wasn’t scary. It was cool. She wants to be a robotics engineer when she’s older, and travel the universe like the two Ripleys. She writes letters in felt-tip to artificial people fighting for their rights. She still hides in the ventilation sometimes, especially when the nightmares arrive, or when mother and daughter find points of contention.

And then there’s yelling again.

\--

Hicks is outside their apartment, on one of the long gantries overlooking the centre of the station through massive shielded windows. From here, they can watch the ships coming in. Newt has a little book where she writes them down; she can now identify different classes by their shape alone and hangs at the railing eagerly to wait for the serial number to come into view. Hicks delves into his pocket and realises his lighter is on his desk, inside the war zone. He doesn’t want to go back in there. He opens Newt’s book instead (she hands it to him solemnly before going to school, as if bestowing a great treasure, because _Miss won’t let me look out the window at the ships_.) The number of entries saying _Weyland-Yutani_ or _Company_ shouldn’t disturb him, but it does. This station isn’t theirs. He’s paranoid, but does he have any reason not to be?

Bishop appears beside him silently and suddenly, not helping his paranoia at all, and hands him his lighter.

“What’s it like in there?” Hicks says with one half of his mouth - the half that isn’t tightened by the scar tissue on his head and neck. That half is good for sticking a cigarette in, where the residual nerve damage holds it steady enough to be lit.

“There’s a degree of conflict going on.”

“You don’t say?” Hicks can almost hear the shouting from here. Amanda inherited her mother’s lungs.

“I thought it was best to leave. The subject matter is sensitive.”

“She’s calling him a goddamn robot,” Hicks translates, and his new eye (another thing to thank the company for - the loss, not the replacement) catches the look of distaste that Bishop doesn’t try to hide around him.

“She’s saying things that I don’t particularly agree with.”

“You remember when you met?” Hicks asks; of course he does, they both do. Bishop because he never forgets, and Hicks because no human in their right mind could forget _that_. Hudson laughed at it. Hudson, who didn’t trust enough to keep his hand completely still, who twitched just that tiny bit and caused the cut that caused Ripley to _freak_. “She almost smacked you. What else were you expecting?”

“I hoped she might have changed her opinion.”

“She’ll always look sideways at you guys.”

“The A/2 had known issues with command priority. Issues which weren’t discovered until after the date on which the USCSS _Nostromo_ -.”

“Yeah, I know. Twitchy. And I know he’s like you, and I - _personally_ -” Hicks puts a hand on his chest, a gesture that he knows he picked up from one of the squad, “I think he’s a great guy. But I’m not the one who almost got murdered that one time. Every time I almost got murdered, it was a human or some kind of giant bug.”

“There was that time with the vacuum.”

“I don’t blame the vacuum.” Hicks shrugs. “H - other people blamed the vacuum. Other people who were lying on the floor in its cleaning path. Naked.” He smiles at the memory; it’s one of the good ones. Admittedly, his recall is fairly indistinct for that night: he only regained a sharp and painful consciousness at about the point that the sergeant told him the repairs were coming out of his paycheck. He’s been wary around automated cleaning droids since. So perhaps he does understand how Ellen feels - if only a little.

\--

“I’m leaving!” Amanda declares, as if it wasn’t made obvious by her storming across the apartment and wrenching open the door.

“Young lady!” Although they are the same age; the magic of stasis, and isn’t that bizarre? Ripley’s hands clench into fists. “Fine. Leave. But don’t you _dare_ bring him in here!”

Amanda has to turn at that - she can never resist prolonging a debate. “What’s _wrong_ with him? You have never _once_ given me a convincing reason that there’s something actually wrong with him - you just don’t like him!”

“Them, Amanda,” Ripley says coldly. “I don’t like _them_. You’re not the one who almost died at the hands of -.”

“I’ve almost died plenty of times at the hands of androids!” Amanda snaps back. “And you know what? I still trust him. Because he’s not like _them_. He’s not like Seegson’s ones, and he’s _not_ like the old ones. He saved me, he wanted to give his life for me!”

“Then why didn’t he?”

“Mom!” She’s furious again. “Bishop gave half his body for you - and he risked his life for you, and he went back when you wanted to save Newt, and he didn’t have to do _any_ of that! And you know he’s safe! So why won’t you -”

“Because I don’t insist on some kind of _relationship_ with him, Amanda! He’s a machine - he’s a tool, and we’ll keep him until he wears out. He’s a friend - but he’s not a… a _companion_.”

“You’re wrong, Mom,” is all Amanda can say. “And if you won’t have Christopher in here, fine. We’ll just move out. But you’re wrong.” She slams the door, leaving her mother fuming, and heads off along the corridor.

Three artificial eyes and one biological one watch her go.

“I don’t think Ellen wants him to stay,” Hicks guesses.

“When was she planning to tell her that he isn’t human?”

“Later. Never.” Hicks leans to watch Amanda disappear from sight, a parcel delivery drone swerving to avoid her as she marches away. “I don’t know. I guess she thought… the longer she left it, the longer her mom would get used to him. And the harder it would get for her to suddenly not like him.”

“Amanda met him before she even knew her mother was still alive. Logically, he arrived first.”

“Yeah, but _logically_ isn’t how humans work, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I had noticed.”


	2. Chapter 2

Newt twists the handle of her lunchbox idly round and says “you’d better get back. Madison’s gonna be worried.” If they stood on their toes, they could almost see Madison through the throng of adults and children - looking for Danny, because he isn’t in his usual place and there are too many bodies to rely on any other kind of vision. “You yell or something, she’ll hear you.”

Danny scoffs and bends the toe of his shoe against the floor. “She’s not gonna be worried.”

“She will too,” Newt pouts.

“Nah, she isn’t. She can’t get worried. Madison’s just a  _ robot _ .” He grins because he’s right, and prepares to run off to his nanny with a cheery ‘see you tomorrow!’. The grin only slightly fades when Newt drops her lunchbox and snaps “Don’t you  _ dare _ say that! Don’t you dare!” and goes for his midsection.

A hand arrests her in the middle of her dive and plucks her into the air like a leaf from a river. Danny takes the opportunity to make a quick exit.

“Coward!”

“Hang on there, Newt. What did we say about attacking other children?”

She twists around and fumes against his shoulder, sitting in the bend of his arm. “If they open their goddamn mouth and you know all that’s coming out is crap, you make sure they never get to say it.”

Bishop sighs, and replaces her on the ground. “I know that’s what your mother says, but….”

“He called her a robot!” Newt insists.

“It’s not a nice thing to say. Although it’s technically true.”

“You’re  _ not _ robots!” She punches him in the hip for emphasis.

“It’s not just about Danny, is it?” He’s not designed for a domestic environment, but it doesn’t make him dull to human emotions.

“We learned about materials,” Newt says flatly.

“I think I can clarify.” Miss Rochelle has appeared beside them, clasping her hands together in front of her neat but comfortable sweater.

“Please do.”

“They learn about how things are made, and what they’re made of - the way water bottles are plastic, but so is some fabric; how ships are insulated with the same thing as their habitation units… and the fact that artificial people are just electronics and polymers....” She smiles and shrugs, apologetically.

“Do you tell them that they’re just meat and neurotransmitters?” He says it mildly enough that her smile doesn’t falter even as she blinks in quick succession.

“In a sense…yes.” Miss Rochelle is probably never going to admit that she prefers the petite doe-eyed artificial au pairs, Madison and Eve and Marc, to this tall and angular model rarely seen outside the realms of heavy industry, aerospace and armed forces. Unless pressed, she might never be able to articulate the way that she almost fears his solemn quietude; the marks on his skin which tell a story she doesn’t want to hear; the vast alien intelligence behind his gaze. She doesn’t really think about it too much.

“Come on,” Newt says, planting her heels and hanging off his arm. “I wanna go home.”

 

\--

 

“I want  _ you _ to do it.” She won’t take the file - a frosted-glass one with flowers along the edge, because all the other girls in the class had one, especially Chantelle, and Chantelle is cool - and folds her arms instead.

“You can do it yourself.”

“But it’s not the  _ same _ .”

“That’s correct. But I don’t see your point.”

“ _ Please _ .”

“C’mon,” Hicks says from the dining table, not even looking up from his tablet. “You gotta do it. That’s an order.”

At this point, they aren’t even sure the obedience programming works any more - but he’ll always relent, if he knows it’ll help Rebecca.

“Ok, alright.” Bishop takes a seat, and Newt presents her hand gleefully for him to work on her nails. “Only if you do mine next.”

Newt snorts - a soft, cynical sound that replaces her laugh nine times out of ten.

“Your nails don’t grow. I know that.” She’s affected her own good mood, and deflates a little. “I learned that at school.”

“Because I’m not real, right?”

“You  _ are _ !” She thumps the table with her free hand in a fist and Hicks rescues his coffee. “I don’t care, you’re - you’re like we are, you’re alive but it’s just in a  _ different  _ way, you’re… you know!”

“What you’re looking for is ‘more than the sum of its parts’.”

“Ok.” Stored away for future use.

“I’m sure what they said at school couldn’t have been that bad,” Hicks ventures.

“I think it’s more the reaction. There’s nothing wrong with learning the facts. But it’s a bit of a leap to expect children to assign personhood to something they’ve just been told is entirely artificial. They only just understand by this point that animals are independent beings with personality traits.”

“ _ You’re _ an independent being,” Newt declares, hammering the table again. “You have a higher order of consciousness as an emergent property of very very high brain complexity.”

Hicks stares at her, his mug halfway to his mouth.

“That’s one argument of many,” Bishop says evenly. “You could also say that consciousness is something innate, something unique to the human brain no matter how complex a computer you build.”

“But you’ve got self-awareness.”

“It could be a clever illusion. With advanced enough semantic programming, anything we say can sound convincing.”

“So then it could be the same for us! We could just think we think, but we don’t. And what about animals? Some of them are like us even though they aren’t made to be - especially the ones with bigger brains.”

“Do you think dolphins are conscious, then?”

“Iunno. Dwayne? Are dolphins conscious?”

Hicks looks at the table top for a long moment. “I don’t know, honey.”

“Can I have blue glitter nails?”

“Not for school.”

“Come  _ on _ ….”

“He’s right, Newt.” Ripley has appeared, squeezing herself through the door to stop Jones making a bid for freedom and chewing the neighbours’ window-box herbs. Newt bounces out of her chair and scrambles across the room to hug her, and it’s one of the few things these days that makes Ripley smile the way she used to. “I’m sorry, but we can’t have you in trouble again.”

“That’s not what you said before.” Resuming her seat, Newt demands the filing of the other hand with an imperious flourish. “You said the administration board could go f-.”

“Newt! I know I said that before… but I was very angry, ok?”

“You’re telling me,” Hicks mutters.

“What I mean is - I know you’re one brave little girl, and I’m proud of everything you do. But you have to pick your battles. And nails aren’t worth it. Especially not with everything else. How did it go, picking her up today?”

“Very well,” Bishop tells her. “I managed to do it without threatening physical harm to any senior authority figures.”

“You could kick their asses,” Newt says gravely. “I know it.”

“And?”

“And yes, they have requested that I manage such interactions in the future.” He catches Ripley’s eye, and she’s still smiling. “For everyone’s safety.”


	3. The Festive Chapter

_ ‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house _

_ Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse _

 

Someone (it’s fairly easy to guess who) has strung tinsel over and around the heating unit: red-blushed ceramics behind a grille, fed by the central reactor and providing the same warmth to every habitation block. Inadvertently, it makes a hearth, and instinctively, people make homes around it, with the kitchen worktops off to one end and the doors to the bedrooms off to the other. According to rumour, the apartments at the top of the complex burn real fuel in real fireplaces. Ripley can live without that. It seems a little primitive, a little wasteful. She hovers between going to bed herself and pulling up a chair opposite - perhaps hopeful that Jones will abandon one lap for another.

Ash never liked cats (or, so he claimed, any animal) and Jones never liked him. Perhaps the signs were there all along. The cat would accept the science officer in his space with grudging indifference - and it was mutual. There are two types of people in Ripley’s world, then and now: people who treat pets with respect, and people who are going to hell. No theology she’s ever encountered includes androids in its gospel, and she can only presume they don’t have souls. Regardless, she hopes Ash is in hell. Jones yawns expansively.

“Newt’s in bed,” Ripley says, because she has to say something to see whether he’s actually reading or merely on standby. “So’s Dwayne.”

“Ok.”

“I might have more coffee.” He’s given up telling her that she takes in too much caffeine. Especially in the mornings, before she’s had any.

“I would make it for you, but I have a cat on me, so I can’t move. Rules are rules.”

He checks whether she smiles first before attempting one of his own, every time. She’s never seen his teeth, and she’s never heard him laugh, and that’s fine. Some of them are extremely sociable, heavily domesticated - his personality construct is, apparently, the bare minimum. She can live with that. And if it really comes down to it, she doesn’t have to.

(‘We could sell him to someone else,’ she’d said once, a bite of tactless anger, and Newt kicked the wall and spat  _ no! _ with surprising force, scowling at her and following up with  _ we can’t _ , meaning  _ we shouldn’t _ , and Ripley supposes that she’s right.)

“Jones, come here.” She waggles a hand and makes a kissing noise. Jones, to his credit, opens one eye briefly. “Ok, fine. I guess you’re more comfortable there.”

“Yep,” Bishop says, and scratches the cat’s head gently.

Ripley watches them both for a while, but he’s used to that. “You know, most eight-year-olds are more excited about Christmas.”

“Rebecca’s nearly twelve.”

“I meant you.”

That at least gets his attention. “My brain is eight. My hardware,” meaning his new body, “isn’t even two yet. And, mentally speaking, I’ve always been an adult.”

“I can’t remember much of my childhood,” Ripley says, sinking into her chair with her drink, “but I know I had one.”

It sounds far more cruel than she intended, but she doesn’t rectify that. He shrugs. “It’s necessary for your brain development. It takes a long time for such a complex structure to reach maturity.”

“But you’re just… built the way you are.”

“There’s a short adjustment period. Maybe a month or two.”

The idea of new synths being children makes her want to laugh out loud. Playing with blocks and babbling nonsense: probably not how it goes, but an extraordinary image all the same.

“What’s the biggest thing you learn about?” She won’t be able to remember the revelations - rising on two feet; words having meanings; night is dark and day is bright - but he might.

He looks like he’s thinking, and maybe he is. His hand ruffles Jones’s fur, letting the purr of the cat fill the silence.

“Humans.” He sees her look, and takes a moment to interpret it. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of unique individuals that we have to interact with over a lifetime - the largest, most variable set of parameters we’re ever going to come across. In a sense, there  _ are _ no parameters. Humans - you like to think you live by rules, but it really doesn’t take much to break them. Does it?”

Quite honestly, he could be referring to anything, or nothing at all. Ripley smirks at Jones. She’s a rule-breaker if there ever was one - and from mother to daughter, in Amanda…. Her smile fades. She hopes Amanda will be round tomorrow. But there’s no telling. The impassive eyes of the machine watch her, perhaps trying to guess her thought processes. Jones is more human than them. She knows that she’s having one of her moments, but can’t help the thought -  _ Jones has more humanity in him than that  _ thing.

“Bishop,” she says, voice tight, and sees him tense just a little. Part of her still thinks Ash is coming for her with murder in its hands. Part of him still thinks she’s about to snap. “Do you like humans?”

“Yes. Overall, generally speaking... you’re not bad.”

“Do you trust humans?”

“No.”

Flat and certain. Ripley blinks. She knew it, in a way, but has never heard it out loud.

“Why not?”

“They’re unpredictable. Don’t get me wrong - they’re immensely valuable; it’s in our core directives to protect and assist them. But….” His gaze flees to the side, almost guilty.

“But?”

“I don’t think Christmas Eve is the right time for -.”

“Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men?” Ripley says, a half-remembered fragment of  _ something _ , a fleeting memory of her grandmother attending some ceremony, in the middle of the night, of waiting up for the swirl of cold air through the door, a lit candle and a blessing. “ _ Please. _ We’re not on Earth. And let’s not pretend we’re celebrating anything other than just being alive. Not this year.”

“Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men,” he repeats, as if he knows it as well. “Except the ones that murder civilians, then shoot you in the back and leave you to die.”

All Ripley can do is raise a glass to that.

 

_ But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight _

_ Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! _

 

“It’s ok,” Newt declares, as he folds the sheet with the poem on it. She only interrupted once, to ask what a sugar plum was, although he wasn’t sure himself. “I know that Santa’s not real. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Alright,” Hicks feels absolved of this grave responsibility (although what kid could still believe in Saint Nick and jolly old elves, after all she’s seen come creeping down chimneys at night?). “Are there kids you know who still think he  _ is _ real?”

“There’s one,” Newt says, conspiratorially. “But she still thinks babies are made by birds who leave the baby outside their doorstep in a basket.”

“Right, ok.”

“Don’t worry. I know how babies are made as well.”

Another one crossed off the list. Hicks clears his throat. “Why don’t you go to sleep, darlin’? There might not be a Santa Claus, but you’ll have presents waiting for you tomorrow all the same.”

“ _Yess_ ,” Newt says, clenching her small fist, and tucks Casey Point Two in under the covers meticulously before settling down herself. Hicks waits until she’s sunk well into sleep - peaceful for now - and leaves the poem by her pillow.


End file.
